[Coco] ultimuse, midi, non standard keyboards

[Allen Huffman]

On May 23, 2010, at 5:28 AM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> I've been exploring the many MIDI files available for Ultimuse and
> while some sound great, a lot seem to be set up for one particular
> (non General MIDI) device.  This leads to some pretty strange sounding
> songs in some cases.

Yes, back in the day when GM still wasn't that common. My first two or three keyboards did not do General MIDI.

For the non-MIDI folks, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface folks realized it was a problem that "sound #1" was a piano on some Roland keyboard, but sound #1 might be a trumpet on something from Yamaha, so they came up with General MIDI... It basically defined 128 voices where sound 1 was the same on any GM device. The actual quality of the sound might be different, but at least a piano would be a piano on any GM capable sound box or keyboard.

The Yamaha PSS-480 was a tiny toy keyboard sold at places like Wal-Mart that had fantastic sound for it's time -- I always wanted one. It had MIDI and was cheap, too, which made is a very common MIDI sound device, so alot of stuff came out for it. There was also an MT32 box (Roland?) that was just a sound box with MIDI, and folks used it a ton.

Today, GM has pretty much killed all of that and everything supports it, but not so during the wild early days of MIDI and the CoCo!

> I can certainly add a filter mode to DriveWire to map each model's
> voices into a general midi layout in real time, but before I possibly

That would be cool.

When I was using my Alesis sequencer, I would go in and manually do voice changes, and I think there was a way to do that on the COCO MIDI software too (Lester Hands, Speech Systems/Rulaford Research). Great times!

		-- Allen